Get started

You’re a new member - now what?

There’s a lot you can do with a Crossref membership. We’ll start with the basics. As a member, you commit to:

Register your content with us

When you register your content, you send us metadata and assign persistent identifiers to your content. Members are obligated to assign identifiers to current journal content (but we hope you’ll register all of your content). You can add back issues and non-journal content immediately, or gradually as you are able. You can also register books, conference proceedings, datasets, standards, reports, dissertations, and other types of scholarly content, and we collect a range of metadata as well. You need to send us bibliographic metadata but you’ll want to send us funding data, text and data mining license information, reference lists, abstracts, ORCIDs, and more. Our content registration guide or webinar will get you started.

Link from your references using Crossref identifiers

Your journal content needs to include identifiers (formatted according to our DOI Display Guidelines in the reference lists, so you need to look up the identifiers using our tools. It can be a lot of work, but other members will be doing the same and will also be linking out to your content. Our Metadata Delivery page has an overview of the options available for looking up DOI matches for your references.

About persistent identifiers

Most scholarly works have some kind of identifier, some at many levels. The identifiers provide a consistent and often widely adopted way to identify and cite something, whether it be titles (ISBN, ISSN), articles (DOIs, PMIDs) or authors (ORCID). Persistent identifiers are enduring references to a resource such as a web page, file, image, or other (usually digital) object. Persistent identifiers are often “actionable”, meaning they can be used to locate either the resource or information about the resource, usually by turning the identifier into a URL that can be plugged into a browser.

We use the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to provide persistence for our members’ metadata records. A DOI is a widely adapted identifier system that provides alpha-numeric identifiers that can be turned into a URL. DOIs are overseen by the International DOI® Foundation (IDF).

How is this useful? You can link with confidence. We use identifiers in both our metadata and for linking to provide persistence for our members’ metadata records. Our identifiers can be used to both identify and locate a resource as it moves from location to location online.